Tag: bad fruit

Sitting here in the autumn sunshine, looking out at the glorious colours the leaves have turned, I realise that I had better share with you what we did at Kids’ Club near the beginning of the school term. While summer was coming to an end and the leaves were starting to put on their autumnal colours, the children were gathering conkers from underneath the big tree on the corner of the school grounds. The inspiration for a Kids’ Club session came to me and I thought of what Jesus said in the Bible,

“No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bears good fruit. Each tree is recognised by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thorn-bushes, or grapes from briers. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” – Luke 6:43-45

There’s a lot to think about here, but with the current group of children at Kids’ Club, because of their younger age, it is necessary to keep things simple and to the point. I was trying to find a fun game to engage them. They could all relate to gathering conkers from the school playground, and have come across different fruit. So, in preparation for a quiz, I went foraging for conkers and some big leaves from the conker tree (horse chestnut) with the “help” of our new puppy (who’s occupying a lot of my time and hence the delay in writing posts!). I also went round to the other group leaders Arthur and Rita’s to ask for some twigs and fruit from their fruit trees – apples, pears, and tomatoes. From my own garden, as it’s so overgrown with weeds, I found plenty of brambles with blackberries! I also had some elderberries from the elderflower bush, some blueberries (shop-bought) and a small branch from my blueberry bush.

The game was to inspect the leaves and twigs, guessing what trees they came from and hence match the different fruits to them. When I showed the children the conker tree leaves, many of them immediately knew what tree they came from. Many of them also knew that the thorny bramble produced blackberries, and one girl knew what a tomato plant looked like. Then it became trickier with the apple and pear tree twigs as their leaves were quite similar. It became easier when I brought out the actual fruit and we matched up the rest of the fruit to the leaves or twigs.

The point of this game is to illustrate what Jesus said above, to show that sometimes we don’t know what a tree or plant is, even if we look at the leaves, but if we see the fruit with the plants, then we know whether they are good trees or bad.

Each tree is recognised by its own fruit.

This game led us to introduce the fruit of the Holy Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. After a brief prayer, we moved onto the next activity, which was to colour in a sheet with fruits which represents these qualities. One can find a variety of colouring pages on the internet, but this is the one I used.

I find that the children easily lose focus if I just talked at them, and they’re not going to remember all 9 fruit of the Holy Spirit, but they absorb more information as they’re doing an activity. And because we’re usually blessed with a high adult to children ratio in our sessions, we sometimes have some meaningful conversations whilst the grown-ups help the kids with their activities. For example,

“What colour are you using for the kiwi fruit?”“Green!”“Brown?”“Greeny-brown then…”“Ew! I don’t like kiwi fruit.”“Why?”“Cos the bits get in your teeth.”“Well, that’s what it says here – you need patience to get the bits out!”

Let’s hope and pray that some of these truths sink in, take root and grow!

Look out for my next post, as the next Kids’ Club session build on this theme of bearing fruit…